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Humans are a virus

“I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you’re not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You’re a plague and we are the cure.” Agent Smith, Matrix, 1999.

In this Earth Day I was picking up pieces of themes to make a post, so I remembered this anthological quote from Agent Smith (played by Hugo Weaving in the Wachovsky brothers’ film Matrix) and this research of professor Cédric Feschotte from University of Texas showing that about eight percent of human genetic material comes from a virus and not from our ancestors, according to a new study. The research shows that the genomes of humans and other mammals contain DNA derived from the insertion of bornaviruses, RNA viruses whose replication and transcription takes place in the nucleus.

Well, virus or not we are more than 7 billion now and we have just one planet to live. Think about it.